House Bill Seeks Data on Who US Drone Strikes Kill<

Reps. Walter Jones and Adam Schiff have co-sponsored the Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act, a bill to require the White House to issue annual reports on the use of drone strikes, including how many civilians are killed in those attacks. Though President Obama has repeatedly promised "overhauls" and on the drone programs, Congress remains more or less in the dark about who is being killed and why.

House Bill Seeks Data on Who US Drone Strikes KillJason Ditz / AntiWar.com

(April 2, 2014) -- Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have co-sponsored a new bill, the Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act, which aims to require the Obama Administration to issue annual reports on the use of drone strikes, including a figure of how many civilians they killed in those attacks.

Though President Obama has repeatedly promised "overhauls" and transparency measures on the drone programs, Congress remains more or less in the dark about who is being killed and why, with Rep. Jones saying this move would be the first step toward serious oversight of the drone program.

Ignorance may well be bliss, however, and the two face an uphill battle, with Council on Foreign Relations official Micah Zenko saying he doesn't say any way the bill passes, adding "these are CIA operations that are covert by definition."

Rep. Schiff noted the drone strikes are only "classified" because the president makes them so, and insisted the reports from the bill wouldn't require any identification of who is doing the drone strikes or any specifics on individual incidents, but rather just seeks raw counts of who was killed every year.

The bill also explicitly rules out drone strikes used in ongoing wars, so the administration wouldn't need to include drone strikes in Afghanistan itself, just those in nations the US isn't currently engaged in official military operations against.

(April 2, 2014) -- One key reason President Obama had to undertake reform of NSA surveillance programs is that a left-right alliance of civil libertarian Democrats and limited government libertarian Republicans rose up in surprising numbers against the surveillance state, building momentum in Congress for change.

Could a similar alliance take shape to force more transparency around drone strikes?

In another effort to challenge the administration on the reach and conduct of the national security state, a bipartisan pair of Congressmen is set to introduce today a new bill that would require the administration to disclose key information about the drone program.

"Our bill would require that the president report each year the number of casualties as a result of UAVs -- both combatants and civilians killed, " Dem Rep. Adam Schiff of California, one of its co-sponsors, tells me, in a reference to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones. "It would require that data to be reported for the prior five years as well."

Rep. Schiff and GOP Rep Walter Jones -- the Republican co-sponsor -- plan to circulate a "dear colleague" letter to House members to build support.

Obviously such an effort would appear to be far fetched. But it's worth recalling that at first, efforts to curtail NSA surveillance consisted of little more than a handful of Congressional bills that looked pretty hopeless, too. Take the case of the amendment offered by GOP Rep. Justin Amash to defund NSA surveillance.

At first, its hopes were dismissed, but in the end, it was only defeated narrowly after a left-right alliance came together in a startling rebuke to Congressional leaders on both sides who were standing up for the surveillance/national security state status quo.

Since then, of course, Obama appointed a presidential panel that recommended a range of NSA reforms, and the President has announced that he will end NSA bulk data collection in its current form.

True, a lot of that was the result of Edward Snowden's revelations, and the drone program has not yet had its shroud of secrecy pierced to nearly the same degree. But Schiff -- who has advocated for NSA and other civil liberties reform-hopes that his bill brings about a similar debate.

"It may be possible to build some of the same coalition," Schiff said. "What unites [these lawmakers] is the civil libertarian idea that we should be circumspect about the use of lethal force and hold ourselves accountable for it, and the libertarian idea that there ought to be circumspection about foreign engagement and adequate due process. It's a harder sell than on metadata, but I expect that some of the same sentiments will be at stake."

If anyone objects on the grounds that the program should remain classified, Schiff says, there's a ready answer. "It's only classified if the administration decides to make it classified," he said. "We're just asking for raw numbers -- not where the strikes took place or when.

This would give very little to our adversaries. In fact, to the degree that it helps debunk their propaganda -- every time there is a drone strike it's at a wedding -- it would be useful for us to be more public. This would allow us to hold ourselves accountable."

In his speech last May, Obama vowed to curtail the use of drones as part of what he said would be a broader effort to narrow the scope of the global war on terrorism and to transition into a new post-war phase. But subsequent reporting on drone activity raised tough questions for the administration about whether officials were really responding to the President's directive.

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported recently, some members of Congress seem to be secretly working behind the scenes to stymie Obama's efforts to reform the drone program by transitioning control of it away from the CIA to the Pentagon. In short, we don't have any idea what the heck is really going on with it, and Congress is doing little or nothing to change that.

At a minimum, perhaps the introduction of this new measure could force more Members of Congress on to the record as to where they stand on drone transparency.

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